Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf

11 Oct-16 Nov 2024

PV 10 Oct 2024, 6-8pm

Overview

Liam Ashworth, Roya Bahram, Tim Braden, Gareth Cadwallader, Coco Capitán, Chris Chiappa, Maisie Cousins, Anna Choutova, Danielle Fretwell, Nettle Grellier, Rachel Howard, Piotr Bury Łakomy, Sarah Lucas, Polly Morgan, Ruth Murray, Dana Powell, HelenA Pritchard, Man Ray, Boo Saville, Chieko Shiraishi, Sheida Soleimani, Olivia Sterling, Katy Stubbs, Francesca Woodman, Rafał Zajko

TJ Boulting is proud to announce our forthcoming group show Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf. Taking the egg as its starting point, it explores ideas that have inspired a myriad of artists from its mythology and symbolism to its aesthetics and form. Each artist featured, from historic to emerging, has found themselves drawn in some way to the potential of the egg, and expressed it across a variety of mediums, from painting to  sculpture, photography and performance.

The main centrepiece, that will open the show, is by renowned British artist Sarah Lucas, who has featured the egg several times in her work over the years, notably real fried eggs in her sculpture and photographic self-portraits. Here she will present her performance ‘1000 Eggs: For Women’ which will see women, those who identify as women and men dressed as women, invited to come to the gallery, on Tuesday 8 October 13.00 – 16.00, to throw 1000 eggs against the gallery wall to create a giant abstract painting. The egg throwing work has multiple references, incorporating performance, action painting and protest. It alludes to both egg as the traditional medium of painting, via egg tempura, as well as the symbol of women’s fertility and reproduction, and the throwing of eggs by women as a protest against the control of women bodies, both socially and politically. The yellow colour of the yolk has featured prominently in Lucas’s work, and was the key shade for her Venice Biennale British Pavilion in 2015. ‘1000 eggs : For Women’ has previously happened at New Museum (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Red Brick Art Museum (Beijing) and Kurimanzutto (Mexico City), and this will be the first time it has been done in London. 

As with Lucas, the fried egg form is an ongoing fascination of US artist Chris Chiappa. For years he has carefully cast, poured and sanded plaster and resin eggs, and installed hundreds of them as site specific responses. The effect is that of an egg-shaped rash, or living group organism, gloopily spreading across the gallery walls, and seeping out of unexpected corners, it is both humorous and unnerving.  In Roya Bahram’s fried egg, it is a single stand-alone form, carved from marble, deceptively as with her other food-themed sculpture, looking good enough to eat. The playful and subversive work of Liam Ashworth gives us his alternative take on daily rituals, ‘How Not To Make Egg On Toast’ gives us a step by step guide as to how to make anything but.

The form of the egg as well as its politics are inherent in Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s black and white photographs from her series Vida Afora (Life Line). The egg is a recurring motif in her work since the 1970s as a symbol of the Brazilian Dictatorship, 1964 - 1985. The series show her place the egg in seemingly innocent everyday situations, such as arranged across the seat of chair, where its fragile form represented the oppression of the regime for women and her censorship as a female artist. 

The beauty and simplicity, as well as loaded symbolism, drew pioneering Surrealist Man Ray to photograph an ostrich egg in the 1940s. Close up and cropped in black and white, its natural perfection and symmetry resembles something otherworldly, recalling the surface of the moon, our subconscious filling in what the majestic, dimpled, round surface could contain. The ostrich egg is also harnessed in Polish artist Piotr Bury Lakamy’s wall-based sculpture, referring to the sphere as a fundamental architectural form and as a shelter for life.

A contemporary of Lucas, Rachel Howard paints abstract forms that bring in figurative presences and physical remnants, her painting here has the egg form suspended against a backdrop of distorted  and fractured grids of paint skin.

Surreal juxtapositions create compelling compositions in the work of Francesca Woodman, the small black and white photograph from 1980 shows a man lying on his back with an egg in his armpit. Its intrigue lies in the tension the egg creates, in what could otherwise be a seductive scene. With the egg precariously balanced by her own hand, Woodman directs the scene from behind her camera.

Boo Saville sources her surreal images from the internet and renders them as detailed monochrome drawings – an egg nestles atop a potato, they are the odd couple, the smooth white of the egg in cosily balanced on the gnarly, slightly battered potato. 

Personal narrative and family history weaves through several artists and their depiction of the egg. Gareth Cadwallader’s watercolour, in beautiful and tender detail, is of his partner while pregnant with their first child, curled up beneath a protective canopy of egg-topped plants. It speaks of the nurturing nature of the egg and its echoes in the pregnant form. Coco Capitan’s grandmother used to cook her dinner each evening and at the end would always ask her, ‘Would you like an egg?’ as a way to ask if she was still hungry. Here two unique Polaroids of egg yolks are accompanied by Coco’s hand-typed recollection on yellow paper. She also has a text-based work from her notebooks saying ‘I FIND IT HARD TO BE MORE EGGSPRESSIVE’ and a photo story of multiple egg images. Sheida Soleimani’s photograph from her first autobiographical series, ‘Ghostwriter’, traces her parents’ history of migration from Iran to the US. It does not show literal eggs but a bird and empty nests, with fallen pomegranates in place of broken eggs lying on the floor. These fruits are a recurring motif in Sheida’s work: when her mother fled Iran in the 1980s following the revolution, she planted pomegranate tree seeds from her garden to remind her of home.

The mystical and mythological symbolism of the egg can be found in Polish artist Rafal Zajko’s fresco works. Having recently returned from a residency in Rome, he was entranced by the Etruscan symbolism of the egg often seen in crypts and tombs. For them the egg represented life in death, as well as life beyond death, and adorned funerary wall paintings as comfort for the journey to the after life. The egg shape perfectly fuses into his own practice of sci-fi inventions and mystical machina for the future, whilst looking to millennia ago. In a similarly futuristic and sci-fi sense, Maisie Cousins harnesses AI to create surreal yet nostalgic scenes with eggs. Her love of food images from retro cookbooks creates a combined fantasy of childhood memories and TV shows. 

Polly Morgan’s animated video alongside  sculpture look into the egg as a cocoon for the objects that rule our everyday lives – the polystyrene forms of packaging that protect our life support of phones and other electronic objects, give way to a snake which slithers away from its shackles. The sculpture connects with the ovoid form itself, an artificial man-made form that contains the cast of a real snake, the natural world colliding with the artificial. For Katy Stubbs, the egg-eating snake is conjured in her trademark playful and colourful ceramics.

The egg form in still life has been a popular and recurring subject, for the show several painters Danielle Fretwell, Anna Choutova, Nettle Grellier, Olivia Sterling, Ruth Murray, Dana Powell and Tim Braden use it to create still and suspended scenes. It is the perfect object to study, both aesthetically and symbolically. Whether it is set against the delicate folds of cloth on a table or a plate of food, it is a loaded source and its intriguing form seems to offer the artist endless possibilities. With Japanese artist Chieko Shiraishi, her still life photographs are albumen prints, literally using the egg as a material to produce an image of its own original form. Similarly to Lucas’s action painting, the egg itself has the potential to be both the medium and subject. Is Un Oeuf ever just Un Oeuf?